Summary: Midnight Commander linedraw chars rendered as q's and x's under PuTTY when UTF8 is enabled, but fine in local console and also if PuTTY is not set to UTF8

Hi all,

Just got SSH sorted out on my new build, got a weird issue with things like mc and make menuconfig - The linedraw chars render perfectly everywhere EXCEPT with PuTTY+UTF8, where they appear as mostly x's and q's.

This ONLY happens with PuTTY+UTF8; If I set the PuTTY translation to something else, e.g. ISO-8859-1, the linedraw chars render fine!

I suspect it is a terminfo or termcap problem as if I do e.g. <code>TERM="linux" mc</code> then linedraw chars are rendered correctly. The TERM PuTTY normally exports is "xterm".

This all works fine on my old server but I can't see what's different...!

I think you are on the right track and I remember to have had that same issue in yast under SuSE (BTW with hindsight I can only attribute SuSE to youthful folly before I found out about gentoo, the one and only distribution).

Cyker wrote:

I suspect it is a terminfo or termcap problem as if I do e.g. <code>TERM="linux" mc</code> then linedraw chars are rendered correctly. The TERM PuTTY normally exports is "xterm".

If I recall correctly the change required was within putty under the "Connection->Data" Category where the field "Terminal-type string" needed to be changed to a value of "linux".

After that I did not have any further issues if under the "Window->Translation" Category the "Remote character set" was set to "UTF-8".

Over and above this I also use a different font named "DejaVu Sans Mono" but I seem to remember that this change was not required for UTF-8 to wotk. My change of font was mainly triggered by tha fact that this font is not only easily readable but also clearly distinguishes between both "1" (the digt "one") and "l" (a lowercase "L" character as in "love") and also between "0" (the digit "zero") and O (the uppercase character "O" as in "Oslo").

In case that does not work out, I'd suggest we compare our settings in putty side by side to work out the differences.

To be perfectly honest, I have not done any comparision (other than the obvious fact that the xterm entry contains much more data; also the binaty file is much larger on my system) and without further investigation, I would also not really know what to look for or where to start ...

Well I tried /usr/src/linux$ make menuconfig and they both old and new go xxxxx qqqqqq so clearly I never fixed the problem on the old server; I must have implemented some sort of hack specifically for midnight commander??